


Tryptich

by NyxDiscordia



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 08:41:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12908298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyxDiscordia/pseuds/NyxDiscordia
Summary: Three children, three short stories. Where were they? Who were they? Life before Wammy's was all a blur.





	Tryptich

One.

 

_Not good enough. You can do better than that! If you don’t, you’ll be punished!_

They were thoughts that came from growing up in the streets, where there had been no room for error, not even the slightest margin for a toe out of line. The other children who failed to please always vanished, seemingly swallowed up by the cracks in the sidewalk; Mihael never saw nor heard of them again, but he still remembered their scared faces in his dreams. He still remembered the man in a dirty brown suit, the one who smelled like stale cigarette smoke and hard liquor, the one who barked _Single file line!_ _Up against the wall, maggots!_ And once he was satisfied with how they trembled, he’d give them a quota to fill, and Mihael would know how much money his life was worth that day.

He’d been smart about it. Very smart. _Clever boy,_ the man in the suit would tell him, baring his yellow teeth, dragging grimy, tobacco-stained fingers along Mihael’s skin. And Mihael would put on his bravest face, get a clap on the back, a plate of food, another day to live.

  
Sometimes the man would not be satisfied - _Not good enough! -_ and Mihael would get a lash on the back instead. Pain for dinner. Another day to die. 

  
He learned that the only way to survive in a world that made him pay dearly for mistakes was to not make them. It made him wild and angry and mistrustful; a jagged boy, all edges and and bloody knuckles and a tongue like a whip.

He saved himself one day, quite by accident, by trying to pick the pockets of some well-dressed older gentleman. It had been a rough week; everything had gone wrong, the man in the brown suit had beaten him for not bringing in enough money and said he needed to look for better targets. Mihael found one  in Watari, who looked at him and saw not a feral thief but an abused child with eyes that were far too bright to stay in the gutters. Mihael couldn’t have been older than eight or nine, then. When Watari took him away, he hadn’t understood much except that he was just another man in another suit. He hadn’t known that Wammy’s House was not a children’s prison, that he wasn’t about to be punished like where he had grown up in. He fought everyone and everything, defending his territory loudly, ferociously; he made it known even there that he was the best.

Until one day, when it happened again. All it took was a flash of white and gunmetal gray, and Mihael was the best no longer.  
  
  
_Not good enough.  
_

 

\--

 

Two.

 

Nate had been tiny, pale, and fragile; he had looked like a ghost of a boy with that almost translucent skin of his, sounded like a machine with an odd, thrumming hummingbird heart. A strange, quiet thing with eyes that never looked at anybody, only down at whatever was in his hands; a puzzle, a cube, a doll - these things he loved, because like him, they did not speak.

  
He had known from the beginning how to listen without looking like he heard anything, to uncover what he could from silence and movement, from the smallest change in tone to the shift of eyes. He had learned how to be invisible from two parents who screamed at each other day and night, who paid no attention to their sickly little child unless it was to remind him how much of a burden it was to have him exist.

  
_It’s all your fault_ , the woman had sobbed, purple and blue and black blossoming over her face like misshapen flowers.  
  
  
_It’s all your fault_ , the man had seethed, his anger dripping from his knuckles, from his palms, from his mouth.  
  
  
They had thought he was too young to understand, and Nate  _was_ too young. But he understood, quietly, in the way all children know when they aren’t wanted, and he never said a word. Not even when they took their anger out on him, or on each other.

He never said anything whenever his father came home late at night, and there were thuds and screaming downstairs, and then no noise except for his mother’s silent crying, or when even that stopped. He never said anything when the police and the ambulance came, when the stretcher bearing something vaguely mother-shaped passed in front of him, and when his father got taken away in chains. He never said anything when the man called Watari came and took him away. He never said anything to the other children at Wammy’s House.

He had been six years old and had not yet said a single word. But he listened. He knew what they said.

The police who had knocked down the front door had said it. The EMT who loaded his mother’s body into the ambulance had said it. Everyone at the House said it. They didn’t need to put it into words, they didn’t need to say it out loud. He could catch their whispers well enough when they thought he wasn’t listening. He could feel their eyes digging into his back whenever it was turned. At night he could hear the words flap around his room like bats, darting into the dark corners, waiting for him to fall asleep so they could suck him dry.  
  
  
_It’s all your fault._

 

\--

 

Three.

 

Mail had always tried to make himself fit in anywhere. That was the kind of boy he was.

From the beginning, there was no one that really wanted him. Even his earliest memories involved being handed down from one foster home to another; no one could handle his quirks, his ticks, the way he was unable to keep one train of thought, how alien his words sounded to everyone but him. He’d taken notice of that. With every new home that took him in, Mail would chop off a part of himself and tack a new one on in the hopes that they would want him this time, if he only tried his hardest maybe someone would, but he knew the truth.  
  
  
_No one wants you._

Not even his own parents, whom he had never known, who left him at some stranger’s doorstep on some rainy evening with only a ragged blanket and a scrap of paper with his name scrawled hastily on it. Not any of the other children he had ever met, who made fun of everything; his lanky frame, his freckles, his shock of red hair; nothing he did seemed to appease them or make them friendly towards him. None of the adults who couldn’t understand why he was always dissecting electrical appliances, or the outlets in the wall, or that car that one time. They’d taken him to doctors, doctors who gave him pills, who didn’t believe it when he insisted that he could put back together whatever he took apart. _You’re only six_ , they’d told him in that condescending voice adults use when they didn’t want to listen.

Mail watched them scribble down the words _problematic child_ on his paperwork, and he knew it was a death sentence. Those were the two words that doomed him to a lifetime of foster home and orphanage-hopping and unbearable loneliness, the words that made teachers automatically dislike him, made foster homes reluctant to take him, that made almost-parents grimace and not even give him a second glance as they moved on to the next child in line because _no one wants you_ when you’re broken.

  
He was seven when he stopped believing he would ever find anywhere that did.

  
But then Watari found him. Mail was no longer the same; he had turned sullen, tuning out the outside world’s noise with a pair of earphones, dimming its light with a pair of cheap, plastic goggles, engaging only with himself in the fantasy world of an old, broken down handheld console. He had played the same game for months. It had been the only one he owned. At Wammy’s they gave him more, but he didn’t touch any of them for a long time. It wasn’t like he was going to be there for very long.  
  
He knew they had seen the paper too, that they knew he was broken. It was only a matter of time before he was shipped off to somewhere else. But not for good. Never for good.  


_No one wants you._  
  
  
  
\--  
  
  
_“Have you met them yet, L?”_

_  
"_ _Who?”_

_  
“The new additions.”_

  
_“No, but I’ve seen them.”_

_  
“...They remind me of another time. They have that same look in their eyes. An internal battle between what good remains in their hearts, and the darkness that festers within.”_

  
_“You’re reading too much into it, Watari. They’re just children.”_

  
_“Yes.” A sad pause. “But so were the three of you, once.”_

**Author's Note:**

> *"The three of you" Watari alludes to are, of course, A, B, and L.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
